Category: bitcoin

Ethereum and other top ten luna, solana, cardano and avalanche are also struggling with market sentiment falling to lows not seen since January…. Smaller cryptocurrencies that have outpaced the likes of bitcoin and ethereum in recent months have fallen harder during this latest crash. “The future of individual coins or tokens remains dubious, the law remains in control of such solicitations and the approval of social media giants such as Elon Musk,” added Tammy Da Costa, an analyst at DailyFX.
CNBC notes the drop occurred “after a broader stock sell-off in the U.S. last week,” but points out that bitcoin “is now down 50% from its peak price of $67,802.30 in November 2021.”

El Salvador became the first country to adopt Bitcoin as an official currency in September 2021 – a move criticized by many economists, including the International Monetary Fund, which said it increased the risk of financial instability. Others have raised fears that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin could make it easier for criminals to launder money, and that they are environmentally damaging because they use so much electricity to generate.

The simmering conflict is set to intensify in the coming months. President Joe Biden last week asked federal agencies to start solidifying the federal government’s approach to crypto, framing the step as supportive of innovation rather than an industry crackdown. The price of Bitcoin surged on the news. Separately, Democratic lawmakers have started to draft a host of crypto regulation bills that are also exposing a wide range of views on the government’s role in the $1.7 trillion market for digital assets. The lack of consensus among Democrats means it’s unlikely Congress will act anytime soon to pass major legislation laying out the direction of regulation of the new market. Some Democrats and lobbyists had expected initial votes early this year, but that timeline has slipped.

“Bitcoin is hard-coded so that it has both a predictable emission schedule and a hard cap of 21 million bitcoin.”

Bitcoin was created to be money “with a fixed supply that no one can change,” the article points out. But it’ll be a long time before the price of bitcoin actually feels any effect:

The next network-level event likely to impact price is the next time the block reward drops in half, which will happen in a little over two years…. The 18 millionth bitcoin was mined in 2019, but the 21 millionth won’t be mined until roughly 2140, provided the network sticks to the plan. That’s because every four years the emission schedule drops in half.

According to Alexandra Roberts, a trademark law professor at the University of New Hampshire, it’s fairly common for companies to ask to destroy goods that infringe their IP — there’s even a law that entitles them to do that. But whether a court will grant the order is likely to be informed by what the brand owner is looking to destroy. Where do NFTs fit into this? It’s an open question since the courts have never had to address it before. And even if the New York court agrees to order the destruction of the StockX NFTs, there’s the question of how exactly Nike would go about doing that.

Records on the blockchain show that StockX has indeed inscribed the NFTs on Ethereum, which means they are indestructible except in the extremely unlikely event that developers agree to fork the blockchain to get rid of them. According to some, the most practical thing for Nike to do would be to send the NFTs to a so-called burner wallet. This wouldn’t destroy them but still achieve the same purpose: “This means that the best outcome for a brand that is seeking to have NFTs destroyed may be to have them sent to a burn address, which still does not actually destroy them but renders them incapable of being transferred anymore,” writes the Fashion Law Blog.

The NFT sale appears to be a combination of a publicity move and a fundraising effort. Winamp is sourcing the derivative art NFTs by asking artists to submit Winamp-based works between now and April 15th, then giving selected artists 20 percent of the proceeds from each sale of their image as an NFT. Nineteen of the pieces will sell in editions of 100 copies, and the remaining one will have 97; they’ll all sell for 0.08 Ethereum — around $210 at current exchange rates. The artists will get 10 percent of any royalties on later sales, where the seller will set their own price.

Winamp’s head of business development Thierry Ascarez tells The Verge that buyers will get a blockchain token linked to an image of either the original skin seen above or one of its derivatives, which is a common setup for NFTs. Buyers will have the right to “copy, reproduce, and display” the image, but they won’t own the copyright. Likewise, selected artists will agree to transfer all intellectual property for their work to Winamp, according to a page of terms and conditions (PDF).

But what’s interesting is why the reporter had to ask in the first place:
In a GitHub Linux kernel repository, it appeared Torvalds had changed a single line in the Linux Kernel. The change: ‘Name = I am Satoshi….’ Torvalds himself has been suspected of being Nakamoto several times over the years. But no one who knows him well, and I consider myself one of those, have ever thought he was the Bitcoin mastermind. It’s just so, so not Linus.

So, while many people were discussing the “evidence,” I decided just to ask Linus. Here’s what he had to say.
“I’m afraid that is just a jokester taking advantage of how GitHub works — it shares git objects between different repositories, so you can use the SHA1 ‘name’ of an object to specify something you did in your own tree, and then use my repository as the web name, and make it look like your object is in my tree….” Torvalds went on, “So the “torvalds/linux” part of that URL is basically just empty noise, designed to fool people into thinking it’s in my tree. You could replace it with [another] GitHub repository name — the actual relevant part is just the SHA1 hash part….”

“So no,” Torvalds concluded, “I’m sadly not the owner of a huge stash of original bitcoins.”

And, there you have it, folks. Nakamoto’s real identity remains a secret.

Late last year Vaughan-Nichols also reported on what happened when Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin suggested Torvalds sell an NFT of the 1991 email that first announced Linux to the world .
“An amused and appalled Torvalds replied, “I’m staying out of the whole craziness with crypto and NFTs. Those people are cuckoo!”